The Biological Research Core (BRC) will provide all four Research Projects with technical and personnel[unreadable] support for facilitating, standardizing, and implementing the collection, management and analysis of tissue[unreadable] samples. The BRC will support investigators by providing animals for individual experiments, collecting[unreadable] animal and human tissue samples and performing standardized testing and data management (record[unreadable] keeping). The BRC intends to aid each project by providing technical, instrumental and personnel support[unreadable] which are (i) commonly used by several projects, or (ii) occasionally used by investigators but require special[unreadable] technical or safety regulations, or (iii) require special equipment or technical experience. The BRC facility is[unreadable] composed of three major Core units. The Animal Care Core Unit keeps rabbits, performs pretreatment and[unreadable] post-treatments of animals that are used for the experiments, as well as sacrifices animals and collects and[unreadable] distributes tissue samples. The Tissue Procurement and Sample Analysis Core Unit will support the[unreadable] Projects by collecting human intervertebral discs from cadaveric donors and from the operating rooms of[unreadable] Rush University Medical Center. This Unit will perform MRI on human tissues for the detection of disc[unreadable] degeneration. Disc samples then will be evaluated and prepared for specialized biochemical analyses,[unreadable] histology tests, and prepared for storage. The Cell and Tissue Culture Core Unit will prepare tissues for cell[unreadable] isolation and culturing. This Unit will generate and maintain a computer database to catalog all animals, and[unreadable] animal and human tissues with their appropriate test records.[unreadable] The BRC will provide an economy of effort and reduce the overall cost of individual projects while creating a[unreadable] higher level of cooperation among the individual projects. The coordination and integration of the tissue[unreadable] appropriation, culture facilities and histology and biochemistry laboratories creates more flexibility and[unreadable] efficiency for allocating laboratory, technical and personnel resources to support the individual Projects and[unreadable] address the urgent needs of individual projects at critical times.[unreadable] The success of a multidisciplinary core facility, due to its service function is less noticeable than that of the[unreadable] individual research projects. However, without this facility, the individual projects would all spend more time[unreadable] and effort in performing the same tasks, e.g. organizing tissue procurement, analyzing tissues and[unreadable] establishing/developing new methods.